Now that Netflix has renewed Black Mirror for another season (thank god), we can’t help but wonder: what’s next? The show has already taken us to increasingly dark places (and even a few hopeful ones), and I’m honestly not sure how much bleaker it can get.

Still, we can’t help but imagine how crazy season 5 might get, especially since season 4 was one of the best yet. Reddit user Noy2222 decided to ask fans for their episode ideas, and honestly, some of them were wild — and definitely worth reading.

1.

Youth is Wasted on the Young

In the not-so-distant future, scientists have discovered the mechanisms to reverse aging, however, they are not able to duplicate the process without taking the proper materials from another body. Essentially, a new device is made which can transfer “age” from one person to another.

Immediately, a black market forms where the rich drop thousands if not millions of dollars to buy more youth from other people. First, it’s mostly junkies that offer up years of their life so they could afford more drugs. Next, it becomes regular people who are either down on their luck or are trying to afford a down-payment on a big purchase. Eventually, the age market becomes so widespread that it becomes an everyday part of life, with people sometimes giving up decades of their life to get ahead of others. The poor are kept downtrodden and old. Some even start growing old and dying off before they even reach college.

Eventually, some entrepreneurs create a human farm of sorts where they grow embryos in artificial wombs in order to harvest their youth and sell it for cheap. Very quickly, this becomes the standard. Society eventually “fixes” itself with the price of youth becoming cheap as a commodity. Most can afford to live forever, provided they have a steady job.

The last scene of the episode will show the inside of the human farm, showing that it’s actually real people that are being grown, injected with syringes, and aged from 0 to ~80 years until their death within the course of 2 minutes, all while they cry out like newborn children.

2.

My friend was talking about how the DNA analysis sites like Ancestry and 23andMe are owned by corporations/people (she mentioned Google and the Mormon Church) that could sell your DNA or, in a very Black Mirror future, produce cookies of your DNA. She seemed really concerned with the idea of them selling it to put in a crime scene to frame the innocent. With a rise in curiosity of “What Am I,” I feel like it could make a good episode.

3.

People get cryogenically frozen, but the company that freezes them goes bankrupt. It soon becomes a huge political problem as to what to do with the bodies/what kinds of rights do a cryogenically frozen person have.

4.

Most kids in the future are concieved in vitro in, through heavy genetic engineering. The more advanced, the more expensive it is. It’s seen as trashy and irresponsible to conceive children naturally, and it’s usually done by the poorest who can’t afford the procedure. It’s basically an equivalent of today’s having more kids than you can afford. Average person does the responsible thing and buys the basic package, which ensures protection from genetic disorders, cancer, other health issues for their kids. The richest pay extra to have their kids tall, attractive, with good teeth, with certain eye color, etc.

After saving enough money to conceive their first child “responsibly”, a young couple spends a little more than they planned to buy an extra package of health issues protection. After nine months a healthy baby is born. At first it seems like a fairytale for the happy parents. During routine examination however it turns out the baby is sick with a certain syndrome. It’s one of the health issues that should be covered by the extra package.

Since it’s basically breaking a contract on the company’s part, the parents sue. Even though the company did everything according to its procedures, they couldn’t prevent the sickness. It’s actually the first time the procedure failed.

To protect it’s good name, the company offers a settlement to the parents, which is accepted. The story is not supposed to reach the public, and even in the classified documents the issue is to be under “error in procedure complaince” section.

The parents however are not interested in money. All they want is to have a healthy baby. However the sickness is incurable. The company offers to create an exact copy of the child, with even more extensive health package.

As the “configurable” kids are seen almost as a product, the parents agree, and the new, healthy kid is conceived. The sick one is returned to the company, where, to find a reason for failure in procedure, it’s examined and experimented on until it’s death. The mother gives birth to a healthy child which grows up without any medical issues.

5.

A reality television show pits convicted felons against one another for the ultimate prize – their freedom. One by one, contestants are evicted from a home Big Brother style before being executed shortly after. The caveat is that final winner is blindsided at the end when he/she isnt released back into the world, but to their own execution. It turns out all along society has been watching them, determining who has committed the most unredeemable crime, and sending the others back out into the world to work in rehabilitation programs where they become quasi-celebraties.

6.

A High school has installed an automated defence suite to deal with the possibility of a school shooting. The automated system is called the School Active Protection system or S.A.P.S for short.

The system would-

Set the Alarm off

Lock the doors of every classroom, and shut every window. The glass in the school has been replaced with bullet proof glass.

Recognise and identify the location of the shooter through various sensors.

Try to contain the shooter with various gates in built within the school walls.

Attempt to incapacitate the shooter with a taser or spray them with irritants.

Give a detailed list of info to first-responders telling them the location, identity and weapon of the shooter.

The system is in place for months without an incident but during class it sets off but there’s no shooter. The system is reporting several active shooters on the premises to first-responders but wont let them in. We follow a group of students as they try to find out what set off the system and escape the terminator school.

Act 1: A woman who can’t get a date buys a life-like sex robot. She gains a new confidence banging this crazy hot robot that also listens to her and sleeps in the bed with her. She speaks up in meetings and gets a raise (success montage)

Act 2: She then keeps downloading new personalities (designed for roleplay) into the robot to try to get the original excitement back. She starts to think the bot is alive, in that its become sentient, because she sees little “tells” that she never instructed the bot to do. She thinks it actually loves her, and she thinks the love it too. She resolves to free her sex bot so he can become his own person, and they can truly be together.

Act 3: She tracks down the programmer of the sex bot, and at gun point demands he unlock her sexbot so he can be free and so she can truly be with her sexbot. The programmer gets a villain monologue and tells her those little tells are also part of the programming. In fact, her monthly subscription to the roleplaying personalities adds more and more tells, in an effort to keep her subscribing. The programer then says AI is impossible and she’s insane for truly believing it in the first place.

She then goes on the run, as the programmer will soon call the police. The sexbot is waiting in the car for her. As she’s driving the LED in the sexbot’s ear glows blue (noting he is receiving a data transmition). The sexbot then grabs the wheel and swerves the car into a light post.

8.

You Go To Hell And You Die

Whiteport is an idyllic vision of 1950’s paradise: men in suits and hats, housewives with their hair in ribbons, a fancy car in the driveway of every perfect home.

However, there are numerous, “old fashioned” rules that one must abide by in Whiteport: women mustn’t speak out of turn, men cannot express emotional weakness, etc. If you follow these rules all your life, “you die and go to Heaven,” as the locals say. But if you slip up, even once, “you go to Hell, and you die.”

Once a year, a council of elders meets to decide who deserves to be sent to Hell. Not much is known about Hell, other than it is “a place of wailing and gnashing teeth.”

Twist: Whiteport is a cryo-sleep-induced simulation, for passengers aboard a colony ship. The episode’s protagonists are sent to “Hell” for various reasons, which means they are woken from their cryo-pods early.

Security droids patrol the cryo-pods, preventing the protagonists from re-entering cryo-sleep (or tampering with those still sleeping). To make matters worse, the ship has no supplies for the woken individuals, as this is a “re-up” ship that carries passengers (and only passengers) to existing colonies.

That means no clothing. No tools. No medicine.

No food.

Slowly, they turn on each other, eventually resorting to cannibalism to survive. As the final survivor feasts on her friends, sobbing and wailing, she looks out the window as a nearby planet crawls past.

The ship jettisons a dozen or so pods down to a surface colony, but does not stop itself. These pods are people who “died and went to Heaven,” having been properly groomed to “deserve” a spot in the colony.

10.

Hot Off the Press
With augmented reality implants and accessories having become the norm, an entire society remains up-to-date on all of the latest news and breaking stories. Within seconds of being released, updates (and even advertisements) flash directly before their eyes in a feed that only they can see, while a filtering algorithm decides which items would be of the most interest to people. After a polarizing scandal is leaked to the press, though, different individuals begin to see entirely different versions of reality.